Jack and Susan in 1953

by Michael McDowell

  Susan swung into action. She packed two small bags with clothing, and set them beside the door.

  She grabbed her purse and went down to the street, then headed toward Seventh Avenue. On the way she stopped in at a delicatessen and purchased half a dozen cans of Red Heart dog food. On Seventh Avenue she walked downtown until she came to the Hertz Driv-Ur-Self System outlet, where she rented herself a forest green Nash Airflyte Ambassador with power steering.

  She drove back to Washington Square, parked illegally by a fire hydrant, ran upstairs, and fetched her bags and Woolf in a single trip. She got in the car and headed uptown. At a Western Union office on Second Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street—only eleven blocks from Jack’s apartment—she sent a telegram to Rodolfo.

  It read:

  HAVE GONE TO TELL MY AUNT ANNE THE GOOD NEWS STOP BACK IN TOWN SATURDAY STOP NO NEWSPAPER ANNOUNCEMENTS PLEASE STOP

  (SIGNED) SUSAN

  She turned east and zoomed over the Queensborough Bridge. She drove fast, as if someone were chasing her. All the way out to the end of Long Island Woolf sat next to her on the front seat with his head lolling out of the window, staring teary-eyed into the warm spring wind.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  JACK QUIZZED MADDY relentlessly. What had Mr. Estess meant when he said that Jack was fired?

  “He meant that you don’t work for the firm anymore,” said Maddy.

  Jack was in a daze. Had Mr. Estess meant to imply that Jack was not to come to work anymore, that he was not to receive any more employee benefits—such as health insurance, use of the executive cafeteria, and a biweekly paycheck?

  Maddy nodded miserably. Tears began to dig tiny trenches through the layers of makeup on her cheek, just as the Colorado River had worn through seven thousand feet of geological strata to create the Grand Canyon. “Do you know who they’re giving me to?” Maddy wailed in the midst of her erosion. “They’re giving me to Mr. Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton is a pansy, Mr. Beaumont. Mr. Hamilton will never even look at me!”

  Jack was embarrassed. In the first place it had never occurred to him that Mr. Hamilton was a pansy; he’d thought him no more than a meticulous dresser—and rather envied him that. In the second place Jack never knew that Maddy put so much stock in being admired; he knew how infrequently he had complimented her in the past two years. Jack blushed violently on both counts.

  But then the color drained from his face with the realization—coming to him with full force—that he had actually been fired.

  “Did Mr. Estess give a reason?” Jack asked, wiping the perspiration from his brow. “I can’t believe it, Maddy.”

  “I can’t believe it either, Mr. Beaumont. He didn’t know the reason. I asked him twice, Mr. Beaumont. I said, ‘Mr. Estess, is there a reason?’ And he said, ‘Maybe somebody knows, Maddy, but I don’t.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Estess, there has to be a reason,’ and he said, ‘I’m sure there is, Maddy, but I have no idea what it could be.’” Maddy had a tendency to repeat conversations verbatim, as if she mistrusted her ability to provide a faultless synopsis of even the most insignificant exchange. At the same time, she tried to recapture the precise flavor of the conversation by imitating the different voices. She was generally a good mimic, but when it came to reproducing her own voice and mannerisms, she was a master.

  “Maddy, I’ll call Mr. Estess, and then I’ll call Mr. Young, and we’ll see what’s what.”

  “It’s true,” said Maddy dismally. “I know it’s true, because they told me I’m supposed to start for Mr. Hamilton this afternoon. Mr. Hamilton keeps body building magazines in the lower left-hand drawer of his desk. He says his baby brother is a boxer, but nobody believes that.” Maddy was rambling, somewhat irrelevantly.

  “I wish I could help you, Maddy, but since I don’t work there anymore…”

  “Mr. Beaumont,” said Maddy, staring in a tiny mirror cupped in her hand, and dabbing at her tears one by one with a blue handkerchief, “you’ll find a job, I know you will. And when you do, will you send for me? Will you say you can’t get along without me? Because wherever you go, I’ll go, Mr. Beaumont. For you, I’d even go—” Maddy took a deep breath—“I’d even go to Elizabeth, New Jersey.”

  Greater love hath no secretary than this, Jack thought.

  When Maddy had gone Jack started on a new round of telephone calls, all these directed to his office.

  He talked to Mr. Estess. Basically, he had the same conversation with the director of personnel Maddy had had with him.

  Jack telephoned Mr. Young, his immediate superior. Mr. Young wouldn’t speak to him, but Mr. Young’s secretary said that Mr. Beaumont would be receiving a letter providing reasons for his sudden termination. Then Mr. Young’s secretary spoke to Jack in a hurried, low voice, evidently not to be overheard, “I don’t know what it is yet, Mr. Beaumont, because Mr. Young hasn’t dictated the letter to me yet. But as soon as he does, I’ll call Maddy and tell her and she’ll tell you. Everybody is very upset, because everybody likes you, and it won’t be the same place without you. Maddy cried all through lunch. She’s very upset. I do know that Mr. Young didn’t like to have to do it. He drank bourbon at lunch and when he drinks bourbon it’s because he has to do something he doesn’t like to do.”

  “Thank you,” said Jack. He had to leave it at that for now. He waited for a telephone call from Maddy all Friday afternoon, but none came.

  If there was a more miserable man in Manhattan on Saturday, Jack wished somebody would bring him over to Roosevelt Hospital so they could jump out of the window together.

  But then, about noon, he suddenly felt better about the loss of the job. It was the sudden realization that he was—ostensibly—engaged to be married to the fifth richest single woman in America. He wasn’t going to lack spare change to buy Woolf dog biscuits, at any rate.

  This proved comfort to him for about five minutes. Then Jack grew depressed again—at the actual prospect of getting married to the fifth richest single woman in America.

  Jack was released from Roosevelt Hospital late Sunday morning. Hospital attendants saw him downstairs in a wheelchair, and paused long enough for him to purchase a Times in the lobby gift shop. He wanted particularly to find out if there was an announcement of the engagement of Elizabeth St. John Mather to Mr. John Beaumont, Esq. A nurse stepped outside and hailed a taxi for him, then helped him into the cab with his two small bags and his briefcase. She shut the door, waved, and called out that she hoped everything would turn out all right. Jack could only reflect bitterly how unlikely a hope that was.

  In fact, everything was not turning out all right already. The nurse had left his Times on the seat of the wheelchair. Jack would have asked the driver of the taxi to stop so that he could buy another Times but all he had in his pocket were three twenty-dollar bills, and he knew that no vendor in New York City would sell a newspaper—even a Sunday Times—to a man holding a twenty-dollar bill. He sat back and sighed, and then began to wonder about Woolf. He hoped the dog was well and that Libby had taken him to the kennel as he’d asked and not simply let him loose on the street. Then he hoped for a few blocks that no one had broken into his apartment in his absence. Then for a few more blocks he hoped that perhaps the doorman had a message for him from Susan Bright, along the lines of, Everything has obviously been a long series of silly misunderstandings, let’s you and I get married…

  Then he was home. With his arm in the sling, and the driver, fuming over the twenty-dollar bill and ill-inclined to assist him, Jack took a good bit of time in getting his bags and briefcase up to the door.

  The elevator man was as usual nowhere in sight. Jack got the outside door open, kicked his bags inside. He fumbled with his keys, got the inner door open, again kicked his bags inside. One by one he then got his bags into the elevator, and kicked out the broomstick that held the door open.

  Predictably, at that moment, the elevator man made his appearance, tearing around the corner of the lobby, crying, “Wait, wait!”

  Jac
k pulled the lever that opened the door again, and glowered at the elevator man.

  “Glad to have you back,” the elevator man said as they rose upward. The elevator man was lazy and nosy and smelled of schnapps. His wife was lazier and nosier than he was, and filled the basement, the stairwells, and the elevator shaft with the fumes of cooking cabbage.

  “Any messages for me?” Jack asked.

  “Just one. About an hour ago. This girl came by—”

  “What girl?” Jack had a sudden hope that everything that had gone wrong in the past few weeks was about to be set right. Susan had come by, she had come by to see him and they—“Did she have dark hair?” Jack demanded feverishly, interrupting his own very interesting and hopeful thought. And then he realized with a sinking: Oh, maybe it was Libby. “Or was she a blonde? Was she—”

  “I couldn’t tell what color her hair was,” said the elevator man. “She was wearing a veil.”

  “A veil?”

  “You know—a wedding veil.”

  “What was the message?” demanded Jack. In the extremity of his suspense, he swung this way and that in the elevator, a motion assisted, not hindered, by the unusual weight of the cast on his arm.

  “She said you should come to the wedding this afternoon. One o’clock.”

  “The wedding?”

  The doors of the elevator opened on the fifth floor. Jack didn’t get out.

  “‘This afternoon, one o’clock,’ she said.”

  Susan was marrying Rodolfo, and as a final kick in Jack’s teeth, she’d dropped by on the way to the church and invited him to the wedding—as an afterthought. Oh, the wedding limousine was driving by and I saw the sign for Sixty-sixth Street and I said to myself, I’ve forgotten to invite Jack. For old times’ sake. She—

  “What church?” Jack demanded suddenly, realizing it was well past noon.

  “The one at the corner of Fifth and Fifty-fifth. Or -sixth. Or -seventh. Numbers and me, you know, we don’t get along so good.”

  “Go back down,” said Jack.

  “What?”

  “Take the elevator down again.”

  The elevator man stared. “Here,” said Jack, reaching in his pocket and giving the man all the change he’d got from the taxi. “Please take my bags and put them in my apartment.”

  They rode down without speaking, but Jack noisily tapped his foot. He beat his hand against the side of the elevator. He hissed through his teeth. He allowed his whole body to fall and jar against the back wall of the elevator until the slowest piece of machinery on the island of Manhattan at last ground to a halt on the lobby floor.

  “What time is it?” Jack demanded of the elevator man, as he pulled open the door of the elevator. Jack’s watch had been smashed in the fall the week before.

  “Ten minutes to one,” said the elevator man. “You’d better hurry.”

  Jack fled into the bright spring sunshine. He’d have to hurry indeed if he was going to stop Susan’s wedding.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  JACK FOUND A taxi at the corner of Third Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street. An elderly couple wanted it, but Jack told them that his wife was having a baby in the hospital at that very moment and he had to get to her.

  “But he stopped for us,” said the old woman.

  Politeness being of no avail, Jack simply leaped in front of them and got into the taxi. He said, “Fifty-sixth and Fifth.”

  “That wasn’t nice, mister,” said the taxi driver. “And there ain’t no hospital where I’m taking you.”

  “It’s a private hospital,” said Jack. “It just opened. I had my arm put into a cast there.”

  The taxi driver glanced mistrustfully in the rear-view mirror, but he took Jack where he wanted to go.

  “I might have known,” he grumbled when they arrived, “that somebody like you would try to pawn off a double sawbuck on me.”

  “A dollar tip,” pleaded Jack, who was looking around for a sign of Susan Bright in a wedding dress. Not only was there no Susan Bright, there wasn’t even a church.

  Knowing that there was no church at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street, Jack ran down Fifth Avenue toward Fifty-fifth. His run was loping, but off-balance because of the cast. With every step the broken bones of his left arm jarred painfully.

  There was a church at the corner of Fifty-fifth Street. Maybe his luck was changing. He clambered up the shallow stone steps to a pair of red doors. The door he jerked on first was locked, though he pulled so hard he nearly incapacitated his right arm as well.

  In order to get to the other pair of red doors, he tried to climb over the wrought-iron railing that ascended the steps right up to the doors, but it was too high. He didn’t get over, merely succeeded in ripping a hole in his right trouser leg, crotch to knee.

  He also pulled a muscle in his right calf. This new pain seemed in some way to balance his broken left arm.

  He limped down to the sidewalk, and then up the other side. The red doors there swung open easily.

  He found himself in a shallow dark vestibule with a high vaulted ceiling and marble floor. He stood still, thinking, Wrong church…

  He then became aware of a murmuring from the sanctuary, on the other side of a pair of wide mahogany doors inset with yellow and green stained glass.

  Damn…

  He pushed open the door to the sanctuary.

  The vestibule had been so narrow and tight that Jack wasn’t at all prepared for the size of the church. It seemed to stretch all the way to Sixth Avenue inside, and was so high that the hazy dust motes at the ceiling appeared to be about to coalesce into wisps of cloud. The long ranks of polished oak pews looked like a neatly felled forest, and the altar was hazy and soft in the distance.

  And there at the front, before the altar, stood Rodolfo García-Cifuentes and his bride. A minister as tall as Jack was officiating. Only a dozen guests had gathered in the pews to the left and the right of the wide center aisle, down which Jack rushed till he was nearly halfway to the front.

  “I—” cried Jack.

  Rodolfo turned and smiled faintly.

  The bride turned, but her gaze was concealed by her veil. Jack could easily imagine Susan’s grim smile, her whispered, “I’m not a bit surprised…”

  The guests in the sanctuary turned and stared at Jack in astonishment, and put their heads together and murmured.

  Jack blushed violently, but he stood his ground.

  The preacher grimaced at Jack as he spoke the words, “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

  Jack turned and fled from the church like a man possessed.

  He spent the afternoon in an Irish bar near Times Square on Seventh Avenue. It was a dim, smoky place, and the ratty decorations left over from St. Patrick’s Day jostled with the even rattier decorations left over from Valentine’s Day. Jack had captured a booth all to himself, and wouldn’t give it up even to the parties of six who came in and stared at him balefully and made loud comments about people who were even more selfish on Sunday than they were weekdays. The management wouldn’t move Jack because he was drinking enough for six.

  Jack spent on bourbon the change from the taxi that had taken him to the church where Rodolfo García-Cifuentes had married the woman he loved. That left him a single twenty-dollar bill in his pocket. He thought maybe he should eat and asked the bartender if the kitchen would prepare him a plate of wieners smothered with mayonnaise.

  The kitchen wouldn’t like it, the bartender told him, but the kitchen would do it. A kitchen in a bar in Times Square got a lot of unappetizing requests.

  As he consumed one white and slippery weiner after another, Jack wondered what he should do with the rest of his life now that Susan Bright was out of it.

  The first thing he should do, he thought morosely, was to pick a fight with somebody and get his other arm broken.

  He amended that plan to: get drunker first, and then pick a fight and get your other arm broken.

  He was halfway through his last twe
nty-dollar bill when he ordered a second plate of weiners smothered with mayonnaise. He washed them down with bourbon. Jack could take up a whole booth by himself, he was so lanky and tall, and as he got drunker he seemed to stretch. With a torn trouser leg, his arm in a cast, his eyes bloodshot, his clothing rumpled and bourbon-stained, he looked very much the barfly.

  He carefully preserved the two dollars that would get him home in a taxi. He staggered out of the bar at seven-thirty in the evening, but no taxi would pick him up.

  He would have to walk home.

  This will sober me, he thought, not wanting to be sober.

  He could easily have avoided Times Square, but that didn’t suit his mood. He wanted to appear as he was—an unemployed tramp.

  Fate, which hadn’t been very kind to Jack recently, decided to go along with his mood for once.

  It put acquaintances in his path. Passing the theater where The King and I was playing, he saw a couple he recognized as friends of Libby. They stared at him with horror as he approached them.

  “Where’s Libby?” Jack demanded, grabbing the man by a lapel. “She’s gonna be my wife. Where is she? She won’t answer the phone. She’s gonna make me the husband of the fifth richest woman in America…”

  The man pushed Jack away with a startled expression. “It is you. Helen and I couldn’t believe…”

  Jack thought he was going to throw up, and he thought it best not to throw up on Libby’s friends.

  He staggered off.

  Rosalind Russell was playing in Wonderful Town, and Mr. Hamilton—Maddy’s new pansy boss—was waiting to see it with several of his friends.

  All of Mr. Hamilton’s friends were meticulous dressers. Jack counted five—no, six; no, just five—of them waiting outside the theater.

  Mr. Hamilton knew it was Jack. The cast on his arm, the torn trousers, the drunken limp, the bleary eyes—none of that fooled Mr. Hamilton for an instant. Mr. Hamilton turned abruptly away with a blush so violent it nearly could have matched one of Jack’s own.